mikechampion's weblog

As Soumitra Sengupta and Charlie Heinemann have officially announced on MSDN , and several of us have blogged about previously Microsoft will not ship an implementation of XQuery in the .NET Framework version 2.0. This decision has generated a certain...

After seeing Douglas Crockford's talk on JSON at XML 2006 recently, I figured that some sort of great debate between XML and JSON advocates was brewing. I had been waiting for Elliotte Harold's rebuttal of what Crockford is missing, but haven't seen it...

There's a new article on the overhead that XML creates on networks, and what can be done about it :" Eyes, wallets wide open to XML traffic woes in 2005" This is a topic near and dear to my heart: I've been involved in long-running threads on the xml...

I'm now here at my first Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. This is going to be especially interesting for me because we can finally talk about the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) technology that Jim Allchin outlined this morning. Soumitra...

There's a persistent theme talked up by WS-*ophobes that it's all just a fad , rapidly sliding down toward the "Trough of Dilillusionment" in the Gartner Hype Cycle . I've come to the opposite conclusion after six weeks back in the web services world...

I really don't have anything to do with Office XML formats so can't contribute much of substance to the debate over Massachusetts' draft Enterprise Technical Reference Model v 3.5 which mandates the OASIS Open Document Format. This has generated a...

I just recently joined Microsoft as a Program Manager for XML Standards in the XML WebData team . For the last 5 years I worked for Software AG , mostly helping to support and promote their XML DBMS and web services middleware technology. You can find...

I see that Don Box is getting some pushback from various folks on his post on Pragmatics. Maybe this will make it a bit clearer :-) The following equipment purchase decisions are orthogonal, even though people often conflate two or more of them: ...

There's been a lot of discussion about the recent decision not to ship WinFS as a distinct product, but instead to incorporate its technologies into ADO.NET and SQL Server. I don't have much to contribute to the discussion about WinFS itself since I didn...

Edd Dumbill has a funny retrospective on the SOA hype : 2005 Will Be the Year of SOA -- Are You Ready? (.NET Developer's Journal) 2004: The year of the SOA? (ZapThink, searchwebservices.com) Predicts 2003: SOA Comes of Age via Web Services (Gartner) Bowstreet...

One of the worst pitfalls a design team can fall into is trying to do too much. The principle is captured by the well known quote: Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - Antoine...

I'll take a break from my XLinq focus to encourage people to submit a proposal to speak at the XML 2006 Conference (December 5-7, in Boston). I’m one of the track chairs for the “Enterprise XML Computing” track at the XML 2006 conference and my main job...

I see Rick Jelliffe finds the previous post amusing . Glad to entertain, but please note my comment . I definitely agree that "The whole point of a standard is to prevent one party from having control". That's what the imprimatur of a standards organization...

With the recent LINQ CTP , XLinq's feature set is getting close to what we plan to release in " Orcas ". The whole point of Community Technology Previews, of course, is to get feedback from potential customers about what they like, what they don't like...

My favorite conundrum, the difficulty of being simple , pops up everywhere I look these days. OpenXML document format vs the Open Document Format Point: OpenXML is so complex no one else can implement it . Counterpoint: Its complexity is due to the existing...

[updated to escape the code so that it displays properly in HTML, and so that it gracefully handles input with an XML declaration] Several people have asked for a feature in LINQ to XML that would keep track of the line number in an XML data source...

I had a lot of time to think about Elliotte Harold's call for XML predictions on the way home from Redmond Wednesday night. We got several inches of snow, which is rare here and the highway folks just can't deal with . There were massive traffic tieups...

For some reason I don't really understand, Don Box's appeal for Pragmatics has had exactly the opposite effect from what I think was intended- more thunder from the RESTifarian pulpits, not an consensus to do the simplest thing that actually works for...

The world has had a chance to look at the LINQ technologies a bit, and the overall response has been quite enthusiastic. But now we're getting some harder questions about how various LINQ components relate to one another and to existing Microsoft technologies...

A few weeks ago I pulled together a post on LINQ to XML in action . I came across a couple more very nice examples over the weekend. One is from the LINQ Project forum . A question was posed asking about a clean way to to load a structured text file such...

This is something of a followup to my post on the XML Team weblog last week, taking into consideration some of the feedback. I'm getting just a wee bit annoyed about the echo chamber repeating "SOAP is dead" to itself around the blogosphere, with nobody...

Who said "There's only really one metric to me for future software development, which is -- do you write less code to get the same thing done?" Maybe one of the folks on lesscode.org who practice the art of using less code to get more done . We shun...

Don't feel bad if you don't know what the Halloween problem is. According to the Transact SQL Blog , it's the basis for an interview question that only guru level database programmers can be expected to answer: Halloween protection is needed to...

We've been wondering what people who are focused on Java think about LINQ, so it's good to see some Roger Voss and Jonathan Bruce start the discussion. A few very good points have come out that deserve some emphasis. For example, Voss notes: There...

After an enjoyable and extremely educational 2 1/2 years on the core XML team in SQL Data Programmability at Microsoft, I've moved to a position in the Connected Systems Division's Interoperability unit. Responsibilities include representing Microsoft...